When journalists are covering a truly global religion — take the Catholic Church, for example — it really helps to pay attention to the fine details in statistics.

What is true in America may not be true in Africa. What’s true in the shrinking churches of Western Europe may not be true, literally, anywhere else.

I brought this up in a recent think piece — “Thinking about world Christianity, as Crux digs deep into many overlooked Catholic details” — pointing readers to an interesting Crux essay by John L. Allen, Jr. (of course). Here’s a key bite of commentary from Allen:

… Catholicism added 16 million new members in 2020, the latest year for which statistics are available. Granted, that meant the church did no more than keep pace with overall global population growth, but it’s still significant at a time when most western perceptions are that the church is shrinking due to the fallout from the sexual abuse crisis, various scandals at senior levels, bitter political infighting, increasing irrelevance to younger generations, and any number of other alleged failures.

For sure, if you live in western Europe or in some parts of the United States, where parishes are closing or consolidating and Mass attendance seems in free fall, those perceptions are understandable. Yet the reality is that on a global level, Catholicism enjoyed the greatest expansion in its history over the past century, more than tripling from 267 million in 1900 to 1.045 billion in 2000 and 1.36 billion today.

Basically, Catholicism is growing wherever it’s churches, to be blunt, have plenty of children, converts and clergy.

With that in mind, let’s look at a new think piece from The Pillar that focuses on the third part of that equation — clergy. The headline: “Is there a global vocations crisis? A look at the numbers.”

Anyone who has opened a newspaper (trigger warning: a reference to ink on paper) in the past few decades has seen the stunning statistics about the declining numbers of priests — especially diocesan priests (one third are now in retirement) — in most corners of North America, Western Europe and some other First World cultures.

Truth is, there is a different kind of clergy shortage in other parts of the world. Brendan Hodge notes:

The number of priests around the world is holding steady, but the Catholic population is growing — which suggests a need for more priests, even in some of the most vibrant parts of the world. …

In 1970, Europe accounted for 55% of all the Church’s ordinations to the diocesan priesthood. By 2019, the absolute number of men ordained in Europe had dropped by nearly 50%, and Europeans made up only 23% of all ordinations — European diocesan priesthood ordinations were outnumbered by Africans, who made up 28%. 

The number of diocesan priests ordained in North America dropped 50% between 1970 and 2000, but has since leveled off. In Central and South America, as well as in Asia, the number of diocesan priestly ordinations increased dramatically from 1970 to 2010, but has since begun to drop.

There is plenty of information in this piece about Western and Eastern Europe. Most of the numbers are sobering.

But what, you ask, about the rapidly growing churches of Africa and Asia? Yes, priestly vocations have been on the rise since the 1970s.

However, here is a passage that needs to be read carefully:

With 1.38 billion residents, India has the second largest population in the world, and will likely pass China within the next few years. But India’s Catholic population of 22.5 million — which is spread between the Latin Catholic Church and two other sui iuis Catholic Churches — is smaller than that of the number of Catholics in the United States or even Germany. 

India has produced a rapidly growing number of priestly vocations for most of the last 50 years, peaking in 2010 with 553 men ordained Latin Catholic diocesan priests — more ordinations that year than the United States, which has three times the number of baptized Catholics. 

In 2019, India and the U.S. both ordained 415 men to the diocesan priesthood.

The Philippines has a smaller population but is a majority Catholic country. Its trend in ordinations is similar to that of Mexico, increasing from 1970 to 1995 but declining since that peak.

What about Africa? After all, America Catholics are becoming used to seeing African priests at many of altars in the United States.

Nigeria is the lodestar of Africa’s vocations boom. With 31.5 million Catholics in 2019 (less than half the number in the United States) Nigeria has increased steadily in vocations since 1970, and in 2019 saw only five fewer men ordained priests than the United States, despite the differences in Catholic population.

The Democratic Republic of Congo has a population which is just over 50% Catholic, giving it more total Catholics than Nigeria. But the country’s number of priestly vocations is smaller. 

From 1970 to 2010 the number of priestly ordinations increased in the DRC by more than eight times, to 216. But the 2019 number was somewhat lower, at 133. 

In other words, there is good news and bad news. But the bottom line is clear: Growing churches tend to produce priests.

Read it all and dig into the details in the many, many remarkable charts.

MAIN IMAGE: Uncredited illustration from “The Collapse of Catholic Ireland” essay at Position Papers website.